By Force Alone

by Lavie Tidhar

  ‘I’m sure I couldn’t say—’ from Mami Grendel.

  ‘How goes it in the world of mortal men?’ asks Grendel.

  ‘Same old, same old. You should visit sometimes.’

  Grendel frowns. ‘I don’t like them,’ he complains. ‘They’re always trying to fight me and Mami.’

  ‘Mami and I,’ his mother corrects him.

  ‘I’m not sure that’s…’ Merlin says, and then gives up. He reconsiders. ‘I could use a couple of goombahs like you,’ he says. ‘If you seek employment.’

  ‘We have a job,’ Mami Grendel says.

  ‘You’re the job,’ Grendel says. ‘Now, do we bash your head in, or will you be sensible and fuck off back to England?’

  Mother and son grin at each other.

  ‘You’re in my way,’ Merlin says. ‘And I fucking hate trolls.’

  When Mami Grendel moves it’s like a mountain shaking. The smiles drop and the clubs come out in force. They swing at him and Merlin turns into a mouse and skitters between their legs and onto the road.

  You can’t fight trolls, he thinks, but they are dumb as shit.

  ‘Where did he go, Mami? He was here a moment ago.’

  ‘Fucking wizards,’ Mami Grendel says.

  The trolls turn this way and that.

  But Merlin’s already far away.

  *

  The road crosses boggy marshes where small dead bodies float – a stoat, a vole, a brace of rodents, all lying gutted on their backs, their empty eye sockets staring at the sky. The stars rise over Fairyland, the constellations are unlike the ones above the earthly plane. Merlin sees the Swift, Old Lady Death, The Dice and Gallows and the Hummingbird. He wishes he was closer to the centre. The air smells foetid, dank with rot and reeds, to turn from the road is to be left behind. In Fairyland there is no real death, you just become part of the scenery.

  It’s proper cold and shitty here. By all the gods who ever lived and died he hates this fucking place.

  Crows and ravens cry overhead. Shooting stars fall, far in the distance, a shower of sparks. The moon leers down on Merlin.

  At last he comes to the edge of a forest. Here the road peters out into the dark and its light fades. Merlin steps, uneasily, into the trees.

  This is the Weald.

  Its ancientness is misleading. The Weald is timeless. Its trees were never born and never die. Its darkness is as thick as that black viscous rock oil the Greeks call petraoleum. The mosquitoes and bloated black flies that haunt its air are creatures of necromancy and all its thorns are poisoned.

  Merlin curses, but quietly. He has very little actual power in this place. The enchantment of the Weald is young as time and old as human dreams, and it predates him.

  He’ll have to step carefully, he thinks, and hope not to be seen.

  Whoever set him up, he thinks, they’ve been doing a good job of it.

  He wonders how long it’s been, and how King Arthur’s faring. He did not mean to be away so long, the king is on his way to council and time flows differently in Fairyland. It could be months, or years if he’s not careful.

  The Weald surrounds the heart of Fairyland like a crown of thorns. As Merlin walks through the trees he tries to make marks of his passing. A dropped pebble, a piece of string tied to a branch, a sigil scratched into the bark. But it’s no real use. The Weald erases everything, he could be walking in an endless circle.

  The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is a universal constant.

  The Egyptians and Babylonians knew this, the Greeks called it Archimedes’ Constant.

  Merlin tries to think. These numbers do not, cannot change. Such things have power here. The square root of two is an irrational number. The Babylonians first recorded a calculation of it. The followers of Pythagoras the Greek discovered the number’s irrationality and for a time kept it a closely guarded secret. They say Hippasus was murdered for divulging it.

  Merlin whispers, ‘One plus twenty-four over sixty plus fifty-one over sixty to the power of two—’

  Is it his imagination or do the trees spread out, is it getting lighter, far ahead?

  ‘Ten over sixty to the power of three—’

  It has to be Morgan, he thinks. She’s always been a jealous bitch. What is she up to now?

  He treads so softly. Branches catch his clothes, tear at his face. The forest whispers, hungry.

  There! Something moving in the trees. A flash of white. He loses caution, gives it chase. The roots attempt to trip him.

  Gone. He finds himself again in darkness. Turns round and round.

  ‘Boo!’ a voice says.

  Merlin jumps.

  A woman comes floating into his bubble, holding a lantern with a captive will-o’-the-wisp. The will snarls inside its cage of glass, in Fairyland its true shape is revealed, a nasty little creature full of claws and teeth. It hisses at the wizard.

  The woman has no face. It’s just a smooth and featureless skin mask, and she doesn’t walk but floats above the ground. It’s just another Woman in White, the damn Weald is filled with the infernal creatures.

  ‘Did I startle you, Merlin?’

  How she talks without a mouth. It’s like a particularly upsetting ventriloquist act. They say the priestess of Apollo in Delphi spoke in this way. Gastromancy, its practitioners call it. Nothing wrong with a bit of stage magic, Merlin thinks with only slight distaste.

  ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘I know of you,’ the White Lady says. It’s said they are the ghosts of jilted lovers, or – well, who knows. The Lady shimmers close, she runs her bloodless fingers through his hair. He jerks away.

  ‘Word spreads,’ the Lady whispers. ‘The great magician in the world of mortal men, who has the ear of kings. Is it true what they say about Arthur?’

  ‘I don’t know, what do they say?’

  ‘That he is hung like a Greek war elephant.’

  ‘What is it with you fiends!’

  The Lady laughs. ‘Take me with you back to that other world,’ she says, ‘and I could help you.’

  ‘Help me how?’

  ‘I could show you the way. All you have to do is turn back.’

  ‘Then what the fuck do I need you for?’

  The Woman in White gives a growl of rage.

  ‘Then fuck you, wizard!’

  She swings the lantern in an arc and hits him in the face. The tiny door opens and the will springs out. It jumps on Merlin’s face, hissing and snarling, gouging out skin. The Lady laughs.

  ‘He’s over here!’ she cries. ‘He’s over here!’

  ‘Shut up!’

  He grabs the will and smashes it against a root until its tiny brains spill out. Merlin tries to stand but the roots twist and try to grab him. He kicks and staggers like a drunk. This fucking place! he thinks.

  The White Lady starts to laugh. It is the sort of sound to make dogs howl and babies cry and grown men piss themselves.

  ‘Fuck you, Merlin,’ she says. And then she’s gone, like that.

  And then he hears it.

  Far away, but moving fast.

  A hunting horn.

  He says, ‘Oh, fuck.’

  *

  Merlin runs. He stumbles on gnarly roots. Branches tear at his hair and clothes. Mosquitoes buzz. A blood-red moon shaped like no earthly moon shines down yet illuminates no path. Far in the distance, the hunting horn again.

  Followed by the baying of hounds.

  He hears them coming. The hounds streaking through the forest. The ghost-men fanning out on their steeds. He hears them crunch through broken twigs, he hears their calls, he hears the barking of the dogs.

  It is the Wild Hunt.

  Merlin mutters pi. Pi is an irrational number, only such numbers hold power in an irrational place. and it is transcendental, which seems appropriate. And it is infinite, just like the Weald.

  Archimedes the Greek developed a formula for calculating an approximation of pi. Merlin whispers, ‘Three point one fou
r one five nine—’

  The moon loses its red aspect, for a moment ordinary white light shines through. The trees are revealed for the tawdry fakes they are, this simulacrum, this backdrop to a mummers’ play.

  A giant horse leaps over Merlin, and in the moonlight he sees its rider’s face. Herne the Hunter, with his head bearing twisted stag’s antlers, his shout of triumph at having startled his prey.

  ‘Fuck off, Herne, not now!’ Merlin screams. Then the dogs are upon him, and he screams curses at them. Ahmes the Egyptian was the first mathematician to put his name to paper. Merlin screams Egyptian fractions at the dogs. The dogs lose their substance and become as thin as ghosts. A road appears, a road of moonlight, and he steps onto it.

  Herne the Hunter blocks his way.

  ‘Merlin, Merlin, Merlin…’ he says. ‘You always were a stubborn little shit.’

  ‘Who sent you, Herne? Just give me a name!’

  The hunter shrugs.

  ‘Was it Morgan?’

  ‘Does it matter, wizard? The way is closed. Go back or…’ Herne the Hunter shrugs again, almost apologetically. ‘The dogs are hungry,’ he says.

  ‘The dogs,’ Merlin says, ‘are fucking ghosts.’

  ‘That is unkind, if not untrue,’ the hunter says.

  ‘Come on, man. Just step aside. I need to get through.’ Merlin feels so terribly tired.

  ‘You know I can’t do that.’

  ‘Two,’ Merlin says. ‘Three. Five. Seven.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Eleven. Thirteen. Seventeen.’

  ‘Stop it!’

  The stag-headed hunter shudders. The dogs bray beyond the road. The light strengthens. The hunter and the forest lose definition.

  ‘Give me a name.’

  ‘Fuck off, Merlin.’

  The hunter reaches for his bow. Merlin smiles, nastily.

  ‘Nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-nine,’ he says. Prime numbers are magic, to understand their correlation would be to understand creation itself. ‘Thirty-one. Thirty-seven.’

  ‘Stop!’

  ‘Never fuck with a wizard, you stag-headed prick.’

  The hunter’s little more than fog and mist now. The arrow that he nocks and shoots does little harm.

  ‘Forty-one,’ Merlin says.

  He blows.

  The whisper of air from his lips disperses the Wild Hunt and the Weald. It erases the forest, the road, the dogs and Herne the Hunter.

  They’re all gone.

  The sun shines down.

  At last, he is through.

  31

  Not that the real Summer Country’s much of an improvement.

  The sun is small and its light lacks warmth and it is freezing there. The plants are stunted and the trees are bare, their branches black and twisted, and it rains a lot. There are puddles everywhere and no good roads. What Fairyland needed was the Romans, but the Romans never had much time for other people’s make-believe. They just stuck their own temples where other people’s temples were, co-opted rituals and renamed local gods and that was that – welcome to the Empire. In truth it mostly worked for everyone, other than the druids and the Christians.

  And, well, he supposes, the Jews. He wonders if the Jews have their own version of this place.

  But he can’t muster much enthusiasm for theological considerations right at this moment. He stops and takes a piss against an ancient ash tree. As he finishes a tiny gnome leers at him from underneath a flower, sticks out her tits and roars with laughter. He kicks, half-heartedly, and she vanishes.

  Lizards scuttle under rocks as he walks past. A raven caws. Everywhere in the distance are ruined buildings. The fae love ruins like a pimp loves whores and wolves like blood.

  From somewhere in the distance, the sound of hand bells and bone flutes.

  Great.

  Another bloody party.

  He wends his way through the debris of dreams to the palace of night.

  *

  It towers out of the marshy ground. Crooked towers with curious extensions, like several types of fungus growing out of a rotting tree. The whole edifice wrapped carefully in mist, and somewhere a bell peals, and somewhere a raven cries, and somewhere a door opens and a voice says, ‘Oh, Merlin, it’s you.’

  He stands there on the threshold of the castellum of the fae. This is the House of High Dudgeon. This is the seat of power, hosting the Unseemly Court.

  A tiny fairy buzzes by his shoulder and tries to bite him and he shoos her away. Looks at the servant.

  A young man, like all the servants here. Some fool who fell in love with a creature of this land and followed her. Or some fool who fell asleep on a cold hill’s side. Or some dying soldier who woke to see the most beautiful face he’d ever seen, and would have followed its owner everywhere, even unto the spirit roads.

  Merlin tries to remember if this one has a name.

  ‘Rodarchus?’ he tries.

  ‘So you remember,’ the boy says.

  ‘Sure, sure,’ Merlin says. Did they fuck? He has no idea.

  ‘Well, I suppose you want to come in.’

  ‘That I do, Rodarchus.’

  ‘Are you expected, Merlin?’

  ‘Expected? I rather think not.’

  ‘Well… I suppose you could come in regardless.’

  ‘I suppose I could. Are the ladies in session?’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Been at it long?’

  ‘A while.’

  ‘Know which of them tried to get me barred from Fairyland?’

  ‘I am sure I couldn’t say. A beverage?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Would you like a beverage.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Merlin says. ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Mulled wine, honeyed wine, watered wine, beer?’

  ‘I don’t know…’

  ‘A nice cup of hot water infused with medicinal herbs, perhaps? Mint is nice.’

  ‘Do I look sick to you?’

  ‘I could put some cow milk in it…’

  ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘No? I’ve got some Goblin Fruit somewhere…’

  ‘Got any fish?’ Merlin says.

  ‘Sure,’ Rodarchus says. ‘Fish.’

  ‘Then get me some. I’ll be in the solarium.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Just fucking do it,’ Merlin says. ‘It’s not my fault you fucked a fae and now you’re stuck here.’

  ‘I like it here,’ Rodarchus says.

  ‘Sure, sure,’ says Merlin. ‘Whatever helps you sleep at night. Now go.’

  He enters the House of High Dudgeon. He’s not even sure who rules here now. Mab, Titania, maybe Gwen. Who cares. The floor is hard and on the walls hang tapestries and paintings of fantastical scenes: griffins fighting unicorns, a phoenix rising from the ashes, attack ships on fire off the coast of Smyrna, a bearded Merlin imprisoned in that crystal cave—

  ‘Haha, good one,’ he mutters sourly. The house knows its occupants, remembers everything. Merlin skirts the way to the main hall or the gardens and takes the spiral stairs to the solarium.

  The sun room is encased in glass. It’s dark now, and all Merlin can see are the stars above Fairyland. Littered around the room are sky disks and astrolabes, celestial globes, star charts and maps of the constellations. Merlin checks the log and is not surprised to see Morgan’s clear handwriting. He checks her chart and sees a note:

  Merlin. Checking up on me? For shame.

  ‘What are you up to, Morgan?’ he mutters.

  The stars are favourable to your boy. But Mars is rising, and with the Sun in Cancer there’s a wide conjunction to the sixth house of alliance—

  ‘What the fuck, Morgan!’

  So watch out for him. Remember, I want my share. Love, Morgan.

  ‘Love you too…’

  ‘Your fish.’

  Rodarchus.

  Merlin says, ‘You move quiet, now.’

  ‘I adapt.’

 
‘You’re more house than human, now.’ He’d seen it happen before. The house uses people like people use pigs. It consumes them. Soon all that’d remain of the mortal man would be a sofa leg, a bit of curtain, perhaps some crockery of bones.

  ‘Not while she keeps me vital.’

  ‘She who? Is your mistress not bored with you yet?’

  Rodarchus tries to smirk prowess but it sits badly on his tightly drawn face. He is so faded.

  ‘Just give me the fish,’ Merlin says, taking pity on him.

  Merlin takes the plate. Two living pike and an eel, and he is famished. He picks a pike and bites through scales and skin into the raw intestines. He chews and swallows.

  That’s better.

  *

  He can hear them talking when he goes back down the stairs.

  Treads softly on the hard floor, to the wide doors that open onto the hall.

  Peers inside.

  The hall opens onto the gardens. Outside are water features and plants as cannot be found in England – fairladies and delphiniums, angel wing begonias, blood lilies and bleeding heartwine.

  Inside the hall the Unseemly Court’s in session.

  The Nine Sisters sit sedately on both sides of a long table. Merlin’s stomach rumbles at all this concentrated power. The fae are to the mortal realm what kings are to their commoners.

  They’re dressed in white. Their eyes are red. Their nails are blunt. They sip mint leaves in boiled water.

  They have no need for swords or knives.

  ‘I will not have him trespass north of the wall,’ says Cailleach, the Queen of Winter.

  ‘Hadrian’s Wall lies in ruins, and your precious Picts can go fuck themselves, dear,’ says Morgan pleasantly. She spots the hovering Merlin and gives him a lascivious wink.

  ‘We are the last of the free!’ the Queen of Winter says, quoting Calgacus. Her general against the Romans, he died at Agricola’s hands five centuries ago. It’s but a moment to the Queen of Winter. In time she’ll no doubt find some other Pictish champion. For now, she mourns.

  ‘The Angles and the Saxons’ growing influence will never tolerate the boy’s ambition,’ Morgause says. Merlin stares sharply. He’d never trusted Morgause, honour to her is what money is to thieves. She spots him too. Was that expression on her face surprise?